


Take Five

by everlit (Ink)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Sburb, five things fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 05:29:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ink/pseuds/everlit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The art of the IRL meetup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Five

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lira/gifts).



(three years later)

"Hey!" she chirps, grinning brightly as she steps off the ship. "I don't think we've met...."

That gets a smile out of Rose, _score._

Jade studies her face, her thin wrists, her tiny half-smile. None of it is unfamiliar to her: once she had dreams and cloud-visions, and once she peered out at the world through fish-eye goggles, and once she simply saw. Sees. Sees now, like a flipbook in the dusty corners of her brain, the blink and shutter of those eyes, the head turning away, the elbows tucked in elegantly. Every gesture is catalogued; fitting them together is just Photoshop in 3-D! Dave would agree.

Except not, because the composite is so much more than the sum of its parts. "You're staring," Rose tells her, with a rolling-back of the shoulders. That means someone's nervous! "I don't suppose I have something on my face?"

A smirk, one corner of her mouth jabbing its way up toward her cheekbone. Rose holds herself very rigid, and the years-or-hours intervening have not changed that, but Jade can see the cracks in her facade more clearly now, and never wants to do anything except batter right through.

 

***

(two beautiful corpses)

Grow accustomed to this strange not-world where everything shifts but nothing really changes. Pinch the fabric of memory until it relents for you; slide through afterlives like a shade. Stare into white dead eyes.

Wake up to find yourself alone.

Stop waking up so much.

Search your dreams for shades and a smirk. Turn up always the wrong boy, or else the wrong memories, or blood where it shouldn't be. Vacillate between relief and resentment, flashing from one to the other in the blink of an eye. You're in no rush to choose. You have all the time in the world.

Find yourself face-to-face with crooked teeth and wide green eyes instead. Don't resist when she pulls you into a hug; don't ask questions, even of yourself. In particular, do not ask whether she is the right girl, because you don't want to know. Let her tell you her every adventure, the places she's seen and the friends she's made; notice the way her hands jerk when she rushes to avoid certain topics and whatever you do, resolutely do not press. Nod when she tells you that everything is better now.

Know that you have failed anyway.

 

***

(one lifetime ago)

Your name is JADE HARLEY, scientist, explorer, and markswoman extraordinaire. You can hit a GICLOPS straight between the eyes at a hundred paces. You have been training your whole life for this!

It's been a long eighty years.

You have not contacted any of them, although you were tempted. You think that if it is meant to be--if you are meant to see and speak with them again, in this world, you will. You remember very well your role in your session's failure! Some things are best left to Fate; some things happen for a reason.

You hear the sound of heels crunching in gravel. A tall woman stalks up the hill, shielding her eyes against the sun; you still remember the scarf tied around her waist.

If it is meant to be, you will find each other.

"Is this the part where I tell you I'm still young at heart?" you ask, and give her a slow-spreading smile.

She returns the favor. "I never doubted it for a second."

You extend a hand to help her up the hill--aren't you gallant, hmm, you sweet prince--which she takes gratefully. Part of her face is hidden from you. You want to ask her how she's been, what she remembers, how she wears adulthood so well and so poorly, but you--

"We lost," Rose says. "I remember it--we lost."

"You can't know that." She can't, can she? She can't remember any better than you, and you can't see your former life through any but the foggiest of lenses; you've tried to go beyond, tried to look past the growing horror of _we have failed, we are going to die_ , but there's nothing.

You have to believe that you found a way. After all, you're all here now, aren't you?

She shakes her head. "The Scratch. The reset mechanism. We wouldn't have activated it if we'd succeeded, would we? We had our chance, and we lost--it's their game now." Rose gestures out towards the sky, towards the Battlefield. She's frowning; the idea of leaving things up to others does not seem to sit well with her.

Nor you, but still-- "Maybe it was meant to happen this way."

A life and a lifetime gone and her stance is still painfully familiar to you: chin raised, shoulders thrown back, face angled away. You think: she must have looked like this, calling up the elder gods, raising mountains with the power of a thousand snarling tongues behind her.

"I can't accept that."

"There's not a lot we can do about it," you say, gently.

 

***

(four chess pieces)

She runs.

Oh, she could put it a bit more finely than that: she has excuse-making down to a science by now, reword, rationalize, redirect. She's trying to gain a fuller understanding of the inhabitants of this new universe; she's working, not keeping idle; idleness invites nightmares; she's caught up in important duties and they've made her busy, that's all. All of this is true. But she is running, make no doubt about that.

She is running because they would forgive her, and she can't forgive herself.

( _This is a task for darkness, not light, so she pulls out her old wands and tries to remember what it felt like, being the vessel for terrifying power--_

 _\--it's far easier than riding a bike ever was, really._ )

It's cold out today, and she's hungry, so before the next Khl'nk can ask its next question she stands up and tells them she's taking her lunch break. None of them laugh. None of them offer to go with her--they're too reverent, too in awe of what she can do. She has the answers to all the questions they never thought to ask, and they don't know what to do with her. Who would?

When she walks into the local glopmart, she finds Jade Harley sitting at her usual table, digging into a bowl of entrail soup like it's, well, food. She smiles at Rose. For one long, weightless second, Rose considers turning on her heel and fleeing--somewhere, anywhere, somewhere very far away.

Instead she smiles back and goes to stand in line like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Two old friends meeting by chance after years: what a happy coincidence. Wow, how did we end up in the same town, Rose?

"What brings you here?" she says, with slightly widened eyes, but Jade has never been one for games and subterfuge.

"You, of course," is her reply. "Rose, it's been so long--"

Game's up, then.

"How did you find me? I know I haven't exactly been a mine of information."

"Oh, I just asked around!" That terrible, easy smile. "And then, you know, getting places isn't exactly hard now."

Rose looks on the face of a girl who could be on the other side of the planet in a second, who has never wanted to do anything with that power except find a friend or see a new city, and closes her eyes. "I want to be alone right now. Please don't come looking for me again."

She turns on her heel and exits the glopmart. She wonders whether Jade will come after her.

(She does, and then she doesn't.)

 

***

(take five)

Years pass. Every little Khl'nk in the town knows about The Human Jade Harley and her house on the hill, with its expansive gardens and vast libraries, floor-to-ceiling windows and curtains pulled back to let the light in. She throws her door open, and they come tiptoeing in, always surreptitiously, careful to avoid the owner herself. She is (they say this in hushed voices) a _mad scientist._

Jade doesn't mind on the whole: generally they grow out of the fear after a few years, and in the meantime it's like a giant roleplay! She practices her cackling in the mirror at night. She does her experiments in the basement lab, and around the perimeter of her gardens she grows lots and lots and lots of pumpkins. (They end up with weird growths on them, or they're blue, or--once--they start purring--but they stay where they're put, and they taste fine!)

John comes over every week or so; Dave less often, but still at least twice a cycle. They travel often, John particularly, and when they return they always seem a little troubled. (Dave lingers twice as long as he means to; John disappears without saying goodbye.) Both of them fly like they can't bear to stay. Jade leaves home too, to see an interesting ruin or a new animal, to spend months with one of her friends, but she knows that it has always been--will always be--different for her: she has her home, one that she's built and wants to come back to. One that's filled with people, even if some of them have tentacles!

She wishes they would make it their home, but you can't make someone stay if they don't want to--you can try and try and scream into their chat clients (when it is late at night, when you feel like you are still on your island and nothing has changed) but you can't drag the unwilling, not in any way that's meaningful.

"Morning!" she chirps to John as she descends the staircase; she'd woken to the smell of him frying cumbercukes, which is how you know it's going to be a good day. "I hope you're not keeping those all to yourself!"

"Haha, never. You're running low on sinspice, by the way; I used the last of it!"

"Well, if you'd _tell_ me when you're coming, I could get some more, geez," she says. "I never use it, you know that. And I have a meeting with the Royal Astrology Company in three hours, see? What's the point of you coming back if you won't let me clear out my schedule so we can actually do stuff?"

He wrinkles his nose. "I'm a free spirit! Like the wind and Vriska and everything. You can't tie me down."

"Time your landings better, then." She pokes him in the chest.

"I'll be here for at _least_ a week, I promise! Stick a needle in my eye and all of that really gross stuff."

She shudders. "Don't talk about needles."

This is all normal: the script of the argument is written on the back of her eyelids; she has it nigh every time John comes home, and some of the time that Dave does, too. She wishes she could time their visits, set them like her old wind-up dolls, but then they wouldn't be them anymore, would they?

Just then the door creaks open, which is decidedly not normal.

"Oh, hey," John says with a total lack of surprise; he's used to the little Khl'nk who wander through the house by now. "If you're looking for the library you're in the totally wrong wing of the house--"

But he turns, and Jade turns, towards the sound of the door, and what they see--she sees--is a tall, hooded figure wearing thick brown robes like bandages. The figure's face is not visible, which is why Jade steps forward with more hope than sense and says-- "Rose?"

"I'm sorry I--" but Rose's words catch in her throat; she wrenches her hood down like she can't stand it a second longer, and the look on her face is awful, it twists Jade's stomach into knots. "I came--home," Rose says, and Jade hears the clack of rubber against tile before she knows she is moving, she sweeps Rose up in what has to be a year's worth of hugs and Rose stays very still.

John is not far behind. _What were you doing, Rose? We missed you, that was really dumb,_ and Jade thinks Rose might be crying; she wipes at the corner of her eyes like she is. Rose is very tan, and her hair is very white. "Come to breakfast," she says, before Rose can say anything more.

"I should apologize," Rose starts. "I haven't been fair--"

"Breakfast!" Jade protests. "You are going to eat breakfast, and then you are going to apologize and grovel--oh, we are so going to make you grovel--and then--"

( _and then, and then, and she was never sure there would be an after_ )

"--and then we all live happily ever after, until we die," she says sensibly, and determines to make it true.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [listen there’s a hell of a good universe next door (the iron catastrophe remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/719940) by [gatsbyparty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty)




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